I'm a little too prematurely excited for the idea that Neil Finn might get an Oscar nomination for the Hobbit song. OMG, you guys. this is like Oingo Boingo getting a nomination - oh wait, that's happened, too (*runs to check that Danny Elfman's actually been nominated*). MY CHILDHOOD, ALL GROWED UP. awwww. except there are a bunch of bullshit rules about original song so it probably won't even qualify, but whatever. It's awesome.

Anyway, yes, the Hobbit soundtrack. I want to hug all of it. (and also rip a better version of an actual CD because this leaked one's quality kinda blows) but WE LOVES IT PRECIOUS.

I also saw the Lego catalog has upcoming sets for both the spider attack in Mirkwood and the barrel escape. So it'll be interesting to see where the split to part 2 actually is (I suspect the barrel escape at least is a holdover from the original 2-film plan).

I really wanted to see the high frame rate version first, but despite having several screens as options here, they weren't allowing reserved seating on any of them, so no f.n. way. I hate standing in line for seats anymore, it's so stupid. So I got tix for the regular version and I'll see the HFR version when it's less crowded. It'll be almost nine years to the day from Return of the King - I know this because Rugrat was born less than a week before it opened and yet I still managed to go see it before the end of December. (and amusingly enough, he'll be at a sleepover - how fast they grow...)

In case you haven't seen the info, back when Hobbit was still in early days of production, Peter Jackson decided that they were going to film for 3D, but one of the things he wanted to try was a higher frame rate. Now as you know, bob, film is actually made up of many many pictures that give us the illusion of movement, cuz humans are awesome like that.

However, the number of pictures in each second was for many years limited by ... cost. Actual film in actual cans cost money, and making copies of actual film (so that more theaters could show a film at the same time) cost money, and having too many reels for the projector cost... money. So, the industry standard became 24 frames per second - not because it's the best, but because it was the best compromise for how much actual film made up a movie.

But then Peter Jackson and Jim Cameron got together and said - yo, this is stupid now, because there is no longer actual film. We shoot digital, post production is digital, and project it all digitally (and even those purists who shoot on film transfer it to digital for the other two steps). And 3D should be easier to tolerate for humanity in a higher frame rate because each second will have more information in it and brains will not have to work so hard to fill in the missing bits, and there is less blur. So PJ shot The Hobbit at 48 frames per second.

Some people complain it looks like tv- this is because video has used (the equivalent of) a higher frame rate for awhile and also because high-def on tv is definitely more striking than your average shitty movie projection (I've read that something like a third of projectors in America are wrongly color-balanced and/or too dark - it's one reason to go see an IMAX version if you can, they have their own technicians who check their projectors).

Anyway, It apparently takes a bit to get used to because it is a distinct difference, but my hope is that it's like High-def tv; it feels odd and unnecessary when you first see it, but then it's hard to go back to the muddy dark picture of standard def.

I say more power to him for trying. A lot of film purists sound exactly like the "OMG we can't have books on kindle, what about the treeeees" people and I have a lot less sympathy for that with movies. I love film, I love old movies. but there's no reason we have to be stuck on a film standard which is literally THE WORST of all available formats. The EU is trying to bump its broadcast tv standard to a non-interlaced 50fps, so even The Hobbit will be slightly slower than the average EU resident's news program in the future. which suggests that maybe, yes, it's time for movies to move ahead, too.

This is a Hobbit flail brought to you by the letters A for Awesome and G for Galadriel.

I have no idea how they can get three movies out of this thing. I am reading it now (on my Kindle ha ha) and am about 1/3 through and... yeah, I dunno. (I am admittedly not a "real" fan, though. I loved the LOTR movies but have yet to read the books.)

It's not actually an adaptation of the Hobbit alone - it's the Hobbit plus the Appendices for LotR, in which you find out what was happening during the Hobbit but not actually in the book. You'll notice there's a significant character absence in the last half of the book - that's where a lot of it comes from. There's also some additional material for the dwarves which I imagine we'll get as a lengthy flashback at some point, maybe the beginning of Part 2 like the way Two Towers started with Smeagol finding the ring.

And as I like to point out to people, the book is a ton of telling and not showing which is quick to read, but not easily adaptable as written - entire conversations get summed up in the book to a single sentence and huge action set pieces take, like, a page. There's a lot to fill in, even where the plot is pretty simple. .